Recently, consumers have expressed significant interest in “place shifting” devices that allow viewing of television or other media content at locations other than their primary television set. Place shifting devices typically packetize media content that can be transmitted over a local or wide area network to a portable computer, mobile phone, personal digital assistant, remote television or other remote device capable of playing back the packetized media stream for the viewer. Placeshifting therefore allows consumers to view their media content from remote locations such as other rooms, hotels, offices, and/or any other locations where portable media player devices can gain access to a wireless or other communications network.
While placeshifting does greatly improve the convenience afforded to the viewer, challenges can arise in effectively creating and transmitting the encoded media stream. The variety of network environments (e.g., LAN, WAN, Internet, wireless telephone, etc.) that may be supported can lead to significant variations in encoding parameters over time. Moreover, digital networks, particularly those based on Ethernet and/or TCP/IP-type protocols, are inherently unpredictable, which can lead to difficulties in selecting particular encoding parameters to be used in creating and transmitting the media stream over any particular network. Moreover, network conditions can change very rapidly, thereby leading to difficulties in maintaining encoding parameters that are both efficient and current.
It is therefore desirable to create systems and methods for controlling the encoding of a media stream that is transmitted over a network or other data connection. These and other desirable features and characteristics will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background section.